Modern consumer electronics, such as cellular phones, digital cameras, and music players, are packing more integrated circuits into an ever shrinking physical space with the expectations for decreasing cost. Numerous technologies have been developed to meet these requirements. One cornerstone for consumer electronics to continue proliferation into everyday life is the on-going size reduction of the integrated circuits.
The integrated circuit development and manufacturing communities must balance developing new technologies while controlling cost. The decreasing size of the integrated circuits presents a myriad of challenges with existing tools and equipments pushed beyond their limits. Numerous new approaches attempt to support the integrated circuit size reduction but require enormous capital investment for unproven new equipments thereby increasing cost.
One proven way control and reduce cost is to use as much existing equipments and tools for the new technology nodes. Other challenges exist with leveraging existing tools and equipments. Most notably, the integrated circuit size may only be reduced slightly and not offering longevity to aggressively shrink the integrated circuits.
One promising technology offers a partial solution for amortizing existing investments while providing sufficient longevity to shrink the integrated circuits. This technology uses water and is called immersion lithography. While immersion lithography conquers some challenges, other challenges remain. One such challenge is a high or extreme numerical aperture in immersion lithography. The size of integrated circuits is so small that the light used to transfer patterns from a stencil, or photolithography reticle, to the wafer behaves differently. In order to use existing light source in a lithography system or control incremental investment for a light source, other solutions are required.
Thus, a need still remains for a photolithography reticle that leverages existing manufacturing techniques while providing integrated circuits size features to meet the new market demands. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.